Aiming to end what President Donald Trump calls “illegal DEI,” the federal government is moving to expunge diversity programs from all corners of society while refocusing civil rights enforcement to banish practices that offer advantages based on race and sex.

One federal agency has opened investigations against 45 universities with ties to a nonprofit that helps racial minorities earn advanced degrees. Another agency initiated a review of scholarship programs for minority students at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. And the nation’s top workplace regulator has asked 20 major law firms to provide details about their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.

“We know there are large-scale civil rights issues that have gone not only just unnoticed, but actively mishandled by the prior administration,” Andrea Lucas, acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), said in an interview with The Washington Post. Citing claims of antisemitism and “gender ideology” along with DEI initiatives, Lucas said, “We’re going to be cleaning them up.”

Backed by a 2023 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court overturning affirmative action in college admissions, the administration is taking the baton from a growing number of conservative groups and individual plaintiffs who argue that diversity programs discriminate against White people and men.

The Supreme Court said “race can never be used as a negative,” said Dan Lennington, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a conservative nonprofit law firm. “That’s the policy now that the Trump administration is implementing. When they’re looking at corporate policies, they’re just asking that simple question: Is race used as a negative in any way against someone?”

Last week, the Justice Department and the EEOC issued guidance on how “DEI-related discrimination” complaints should be filed. Days earlier, the EEOC asked 20 large law firms for details on their diversity programs, including intern lists going back nearly a decade; the firms of Latham & Watkins, Kirkland & Ellis, and Skadden all received letters.

Lucas said the guidance was “absolutely” designed to put employers on notice about which programs the EEOC considers unlawful, such as internships and employee resource groups that exclude people based on race and sex.

“It’s my opinion that the prior administration willfully allowed confusion to exist in the public’s mind over when DEI programs could cross into unlawful,” Lucas said. “And this administration absolutely will no longer close its eyes to that.”

Meanwhile, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs — established nearly five decades ago to ensure the nation’s largest contractors took “affirmative action” to end discrimination at their companies — is being refashioned to crack down on DEI, according to an agencywide email sent Monday by its new director, Catherine Eschbach.

When Trump in January rescinded a 1965 executive order by President Lyndon B. Johnson requiring federal contractors to practice affirmative action, it stripped the OFCCP of its authority to perform race- and gender-based audits of companies’ hiring and pay practices. The administration also wants to slash 90 percent of the agency’s workforce of 500, according to documents reviewed by The Post.

Nevertheless, Eschbach wrote, the OFCCP will vet federal contractors — Google and Lockheed Martin among them — to ensure they have shelved “affirmative action” policies meant to promote equal opportunity for minorities and women. It also will look for patterns of “long-standing unlawful discrimination” and investigate accordingly, Eschbach wrote.

This realignment of civil rights enforcement stems from Trump orders meant to eradicate DEI throughout the federal government, its contracting base and its pool of grant recipients. Recent legal challenges allege that the orders alone have chilled DEI efforts — and, in certain instances, protected speech.

Civil rights officials from Democratic administrations say Trump has weaponized his agencies to the point of overreach.

This is “an effort by the administration to use all of its levers to intimidate employers, corporations, universities and private actors from engaging in activities that this administration doesn’t like, even if they have the lawful right to engage in those activities,” said Jenny Yang, who led the EEOC during the Obama administration and the OFCCP under Biden.

She added: “A lot of these attacks go beyond the enforcement authorities of the agencies and really attempt to chill First Amendment rights of private actors to have values and engage in speech through programs that promote full inclusion of all workers in a way that’s fully lawful.”

The result so far has been a deepening retrenchment as firms and universities increasingly shed programs and public commitments to diversity, fearful that they might attract government attention. A rash of Fortune 500 corporations — including Google, Target and Goldman Sachs — have dropped core diversity initiatives, while the number of companies mentioning “diversity, equity and inclusion” in their annual filings has dropped 60 percent so far this year compared with 2024, according to a New York Times analysis.

Meanwhile, universities are scrubbing mention of DEI from their websites. The University of Akron in Ohio discontinued its annual “Rethinking Race” seminar, and students in the University of North Carolina system no longer have to take DEI-related classes to graduate.

“I have never seen the federal government use its powers to flip our civil rights laws on their heads,” Yang said. “Our laws protect everyone, but you shouldn’t prevent people from engaging in activities that are designed to provide fair treatment to all and to remove barriers to opportunity.”

Frank Dobbin, a sociology professor at Harvard University who has done extensive research on diversity programs, said the White House campaign exceeds previous efforts to curb diversity programs.

During the Reagan years, the EEOC and the OFCCP largely scaled back enforcement amid a push to cut regulation and tamp down on affirmative action. But Reagan “didn’t try to do anything close to what Trump has done,” said Dobbin, who chronicled the rise of diversity initiatives in his 2009 book, “Inventing Equal Opportunity.”

Trump’s campaign has benefited from the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In finding that race-conscious admissions policies violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, it unleashed a flood of lawsuits challenging like-minded programs in the public and private sectors. That movement was largely undertaken by private plaintiffs and conservative law firms, and it scored numerous victories that included the upending of longtime federal programs and widespread adjustments in the private sector.

Now, the Trump administration has largely institutionalized that work, with the EEOC and the Justice Department “supercharged to target race-based policies,” said Lennington, the conservative legal activist.

On March 19, the EEOC and the Justice Department issued joint guidance on what they say constitutes “unlawful” diversity programs. While DEI has no fixed legal definition, such practices “may be unlawful if they involve an employer … taking an employment action motivated — in whole or in part — by an employee’s race, sex, or another protected characteristic,” the guidance says.

It included a document for workers, titled “What You Should Know About DEI-Related Discrimination at Work,” which details how workers can file a complaint and when such policies become unlawful. A second document lists the types of DEI programs the agency now considers unlawful, such as hiring, fringe benefits and exclusion from mentoring groups and training based on protected characteristics like race and sex.

The document adds that “limiting, segregating, or classifying” employees based on race and sex is also unlawful — such as restricting membership in employee resource or affinity groups. It also notes that policies meant to ensure a diverse job candidate slate can also represent “disparate treatment.”

Civil rights offices throughout the federal government also are opening probes into DEI practices at a host of institutions.

In March, the Department of Health and Human Services opened investigations into Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center over fellowship and scholarship programs targeted at minorities and women. The inquiries, launched by the agency’s civil rights office, allege unlawful discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by entities that receive federal funding.

Those probes follow complaints by Lennington’s Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

The Justice Department also has indicated that it’s looking into DEI programs in higher education. In February, Ed Martin Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to Georgetown Law School inquiring about its DEI practices, alleging that the school “continues to teach and promote DEI.” Later that month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi admonished the American Bar Association — which accredits American law schools — over a requirement that schools demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion, calling it illegal.

Similarly, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened investigations this month into 45 universities and their ties to The PhD Project, a nonprofit focused on helping racial minorities earn advanced degrees. That comes on top of an investigation into six other universities for race-conscious scholarship programs.

The PhD Project said it is adjusting its programs to be race-neutral.

“Our vision is to create a broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders who are committed to excellence and to each other, through networking, mentorship, and unique events,” The PhD Project said in a statement. “This year, we have opened our membership application to anyone who shares that vision.”